"Baby Face" director Alfred E. Green's provocative mystery "Cover-Up" lives up to its title. This deceptively bland movie concerns a homicide in a rural town, and everybody in the town hated the individual who was gunned down in his own home. An outsider who represents a large insurance company arrives, but he doesn't accept the questionable the story that everybody else buys. They believe the victim committed suicide. Nevertheless, the sheriff does his best to shield the real murderer from exposure for the crime. Initially, the hero sticks around to prove his theory about murder rather than the contrived charge of suicide. Eventually, however, the insurance man changes his point of view and adopts the perspective of the sheriff. Meantime, he encounters the girl of his dreams, and they fall in love. "Cover Up" received several negative reviews, but I think that these spectators have misjudged this modest but effective movie. Interestingly enough, one of the two scenarists, Jonathan Rix was actually leading man Dennis O'Keefe. "Highway Dragnet" scribe Jerome Odlum penned this offbeat melodrama that benefits from "Hitler Gang" lenser Ernest Lazlo's atmospheric cinematography.
Chain-smoking Insurance Detective Sam Donaldson (Dennis O'Keefe of "Raw Deal") is dispatched by his company to investigate the apparent suicide of a policy holder, Roger Phillips, in a closely-knit small, Mid-western town. Sam discovers many provocative things about this suicide that don't add up and leads him to suspect Phillips didn't commit suicide. Instead, Sam concludes that the suicide was really murder. When the movie opens, we see a train pull into a railway depot and a fashionably attired woman, Anita Weatherby (Barbara Britton of "So Proudly We Hail") gets off it with Christmas packages piled high to her chin. Naturally, Anita cannot hold the load and drops some presents. Gallantly, Sam volunteers to help Anita, and the seeds of romance are sown. Sam is baffled when he learns that Phillips has already been buried; no coroner's report has been filed; and the bullet that killed him is missing. Furthermore, according to the undertaker, the body contained no powder burns from a gun having been discharged at close range. Eventually, cantankerous Marlowe County Sheriff Larry Best (William Bendix of "Detective Story") not only provides Sam with the bullet that he found at the scene of Phillips' death, but also that he states that a Luger was the kind of automatic pistol used to kill Phillips. Meanwhile, Sam's superior at the Insurance agency tells him to get to the bottom of the case.
Before long, Sam learns that Anita's father, Stuart Weatherby (Art Baker of "The Beginning or The End"), had given the local town doctor a Luger that he brought back with him from World War I. Mistakenly enough, Sam suspects that Stuart committed the crime. Indeed, Sam has the local newspaper publish a false story to lure Stuart into showing up at the late doctor's house to incriminate himself. Stuart's housekeeper burns the newspaper with the fake article in it and then burns Weatherby's decades old beaver coat handed down to him by his own father. When the dead man was found, the murderer stood over him with a coat dripping with water. Sam believes that a forensic specialist will be able to link the water that dripped off the coat to Stuart's coat, but the housekeeper burns the venerable coat. This doesn't prevent Stuart from taking the bait and falling into Sam's trap. The big resolution scene reveals that Stuart didn't kill the policy holder. Instead, a doctor who died recently from a heart attack but who was held in high regard by the community was responsible for killing the man.
William Bendix plays the suspicious sheriff, and we suspect that he may have been responsible for the crime. "Cover up" is a good movie, but it is far from conventional. The idea that a murderer could get away with a crime because his exposure as a murderer would ruin his reputation is an interesting concept.
Chain-smoking Insurance Detective Sam Donaldson (Dennis O'Keefe of "Raw Deal") is dispatched by his company to investigate the apparent suicide of a policy holder, Roger Phillips, in a closely-knit small, Mid-western town. Sam discovers many provocative things about this suicide that don't add up and leads him to suspect Phillips didn't commit suicide. Instead, Sam concludes that the suicide was really murder. When the movie opens, we see a train pull into a railway depot and a fashionably attired woman, Anita Weatherby (Barbara Britton of "So Proudly We Hail") gets off it with Christmas packages piled high to her chin. Naturally, Anita cannot hold the load and drops some presents. Gallantly, Sam volunteers to help Anita, and the seeds of romance are sown. Sam is baffled when he learns that Phillips has already been buried; no coroner's report has been filed; and the bullet that killed him is missing. Furthermore, according to the undertaker, the body contained no powder burns from a gun having been discharged at close range. Eventually, cantankerous Marlowe County Sheriff Larry Best (William Bendix of "Detective Story") not only provides Sam with the bullet that he found at the scene of Phillips' death, but also that he states that a Luger was the kind of automatic pistol used to kill Phillips. Meanwhile, Sam's superior at the Insurance agency tells him to get to the bottom of the case.
Before long, Sam learns that Anita's father, Stuart Weatherby (Art Baker of "The Beginning or The End"), had given the local town doctor a Luger that he brought back with him from World War I. Mistakenly enough, Sam suspects that Stuart committed the crime. Indeed, Sam has the local newspaper publish a false story to lure Stuart into showing up at the late doctor's house to incriminate himself. Stuart's housekeeper burns the newspaper with the fake article in it and then burns Weatherby's decades old beaver coat handed down to him by his own father. When the dead man was found, the murderer stood over him with a coat dripping with water. Sam believes that a forensic specialist will be able to link the water that dripped off the coat to Stuart's coat, but the housekeeper burns the venerable coat. This doesn't prevent Stuart from taking the bait and falling into Sam's trap. The big resolution scene reveals that Stuart didn't kill the policy holder. Instead, a doctor who died recently from a heart attack but who was held in high regard by the community was responsible for killing the man.
William Bendix plays the suspicious sheriff, and we suspect that he may have been responsible for the crime. "Cover up" is a good movie, but it is far from conventional. The idea that a murderer could get away with a crime because his exposure as a murderer would ruin his reputation is an interesting concept.